Alstonia boonei De Wild is a herbal medicinal plant of West African origin, popularly known as God's tree or “Onyame dua”. Within West Africa, it is considered as sacred in some forest communities; consequently the plant parts are not eaten. The plant parts have been traditionally used for its antimalarial, aphrodisiac, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, and antipyretic activities, which have also been proved scientifically. The plant parts are rich in various bioactive compounds such as echitamidine, Nα-formylechitamidine, boonein, loganin, lupeol, ursolic acid, and β-amyrin among which the alkaloids and triterpenoids form a major portion. The present paper aims at investigating the main research undertaken on the plant in order to provide sufficient baseline information for future work and for commercial exploitation.

Three novel bicyclic 14-membered macrolides with 2,6-cis and trans-fused dihydro-or tetrahydropyran rings, namely aspergillides A-C, have recently been isolated by Kusumi and co-workers from a marine-derived fungus Aspergillus ostianusstrain 01F313. These compounds exhibited potent cytotoxicity against mouse lymphatic leukemia cells and also toward a number of different cancer cell lines including, HL-60 (human promyelocyticleukemia), MDA-MB-231 (human breast carcinoma), and HT1080 (human fibrosarcoma) cell lines. Altering the core skeleton and substituents on free alcohol of aspergillides resulted in improved biological activity [1-8]. Based on the biological evaluation results and as part of our ongoing projects in this area we became interested to design and synthesize some analogues by altering the core skeleton and the substituents on pyran ring alcohol which are expected to be more potent than the parent aspergillide. Objective of the current work is to prepare novel13 membered aspergillide analogues. Herein, the synthesis of some of the analogues is described. The synthesized analogues will be evaluated for their anti tumor activity against various cancer cell lines.

There is worldwide campaign against the consumption of sugar said to be a possible cause of obesity and diabetes. The major sources of added sugars are regular soft drinks, beers, sugar candies, cakes, cookies, pies, fruit drinks, dairy desserts and milk products (ice cream, sweetened yogurt and sweetened milk), and other grains. The use of sugar in brewing is widespread and the consumption of beer is a matter of concern as one of the possible causes of diabetes type II.The 6 brands of beer produced in Ghana namely Guinness, Stone (produced from rice), Root Extra (produced from cassava), Star, Gulder, Club were therefore analysed for their total carbohydrate contents. The phenol-sulphuric acid method was employed and the absorbance was measured at 485nm. The total carbohydrate contents of the 6 beer samples expressed in terms of glucose ranged from the maximum of 34.58 + 1.